I grew up poor.
I know people who grew up poor and are used to not having luxury and so still don't seek it, and others like your husband.
I know people who grew up middle class and above for whom status is very important and other's who never needed it.
I honestly don't think growing up poor or rich or anything else has any bearing what-so-ever on what you are describing.
A greater feeling of needing security, maybe. A different standard of expectation of what counts as deprivation, certainly.
But the need for social status is just something that varies by the individual. How one grew up is just a rationalization (at least in the cases that manifest in what you described).
We were on section 8, food stamps, wic, afdc, and still lived in the crappy, scary part of town, in one of the worst cities in America for poverty and crime (at the time - I actually moved back here recently, but it has improved by an order of magnitude!).
We usually (not always) had a car, but it frequently didn't work. Some of my earliest memories involve being stranded random places because the car broke down (again).
All the families around were the same, so I took everything as it was for granted. We were never hungry or homeless, so it never occurred to me we were supposedly "poor". There were kids at school who cared about the brand of shoes people wore, but I was never particularly interested in those people, mainly because they were usually stupid.
It never even occurred to me as a possibility until, I think, college, that anyone who wasn't "rich" would ever even consider buying a new car. Like, not just not from the classified ads or a parking lot "for sale" sign, but not even just from a (used) car dealer, but actually
new new, like from a factory or whatever. Rich people buy cars, and then when they upgrade, everyone else buys the old one. Obviously. Right?
Growing up poor made getting to early retirement much much easier, because my standards for "basic necessity" were just the literal basic necessities - clean water, healthy food, some form of shelter - and I saw everything else as a bonus to make life more fun if I happened to be able to afford it. As a young adult I lived in an RV, rode my bike everywhere, and my TV was a 5 inch black and white set with an analog tuner. To this day I've never owned a car (or truck or van) less than 20 years old, and there average is closer to 30. Still never purchased a pocket computer ("smart" "phone").
I have friends (and a wife) who grew up in large houses in the hills, new cars, afterschool music and sports lessons and a computer in the house when my school still had one computer for the entire school, who today are 100% on board with frugality and living small and efficient.
We have friends (and ex-friends) who drive Mercedes SUVs in the (snow free) city, or make comments like "you couldn't pay me to live in that house" (about a house larger and in a nicer neighborhood than ours) - and who are constantly worrying about making ends meet each month, due to living in the nicest house they can afford, eating out regularly, and the cost of childcare that lets them work 2 full-time jobs, in order to afford...
You get the idea.
Point is, this isn't a ex-poverty issue.
It is an untamed mammoth issue:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html